Brokeback Cat Toy

Earlier this week, it seemed as though my back was nearly healed. I went on a hike over the weekend and taught bjj on Monday night. However, after a 45 minute hike on Tuesday, I felt the brief hitch that seems to signal doom. It is worse now than after the original injury -- yesterday I had to slowly crawl through the house if I needed to use the toilet.

I couldn't walk up the stairs last night to bed, so I slept on the couch, which meant I didn't sleep much because each of the three animals took it in turn to take advantage of my situation. I was jumped on, rubbed against, licked, and patted. This might sound like a kickass porn vid, but it left me cursing the dawn.

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That's the bad news. The good news is that I set myself a task on Monday: to write every day. On Monday and Tuesday I produced drafts of two short stories. Then, after getting a facebook message from a local filmmaker, I was inspired to work on a script. I lifted a core idea from my second short story and used that to sculpt a basic story. I went online and read webpages about how to build scripts, and I read through a handful of samples.

As the story grew, I began to see it as a dark comedy about a young teenager. I decided it would be mature and without condescension, while at the same time avoiding profanity. This came from my difficulties finding movies to watch with the Dufflebag -- he has a sense that kid's films are somehow beneath him, but the amount of stuff aimed for teens that doesn't involve super duper villains or the ghosts of Porky's is slim. So that's the starting point. I stayed up until three in the morning doing an outline, diagramming conflict, obstacles, characters, all the classic film stuff, just to have a sense of where I was going before I settle in and hope the words write themselves.